Apple iPhone and iPod Touch get their very own Picasa

Google brings its Picasa photo sharing application to Mobile OS X Safari, with an interface designed especially for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Google's photo sharing application Picasa has been redesigned to support Safari on OS X Mobile, allowing iPhone and iPod Touch users to see the albums they've uploaded to Picasa Web, watch slideshows, search for photos, and browse other users' albums through the tactile interface.

To check out the site, go to picasaweb.google.com. Note that the launch is currently only in English, so non-English users should change their language preference.

While Picasa mobile can also be accessed from Windows Mobile devices, it lacks the elegant interface shown in the iPhone-optimized version, and may leave users feeling a bit neglected.

It may seem that Google is addressing only a small sector of mobile devices, since there are far more handsets powered by Windows, but according to Market Share last month, iPhone users access the mobile Web about 3% more than users of Windows Mobile.

Furthermore, adoption of Google's open mobile platform Android is believed to be quite high with more than 30 mobile handset manufacturers and wireless carriers on board, and the similarities between OS X (based on a UNIX platform) and the Linux platform on which Android is based outnumber their differences. This typically makes porting software between the platforms a simple enough affair.

This could mean that the current shortcomings, and Google's apparent back-burnering of Windows Mobile, may become afterthoughts as the evolution of mobile software as a whole moves forward.